By Isaac Christopher Lubogo
They say Europe borrowed the hands of angels. I believe it. But on my visit to Germany, I began to suspect that some angels are now out of work.
It was a cold Munich afternoon, the kind that makes you believe even the clouds are employed in air-conditioning. I sat in my Audi A5, its hum soft, German, and self-assured — the kind of hum that says civilization has arrived and it drives on diesel.
There, by the traffic lights, stood a man — or so I thought. His beard was the geography of despair, and his eyes, the map of lost pensions. I reached for a five-euro coin, that humble missionary of kindness. My window rolled down like a divine invitation.
He looked in. Our eyes met — mine, brown and sun-forged from the equator; his, pale and tired from too much civilization.
Then the miracle happened.
He ran away.
Not walked. Not smiled. Not even gestured “nein, danke.” He sprinted — as if the five euros were radioactive, or perhaps as if he had just seen an apparition from the Book of Genesis driving a German car.
For a second, I was frozen — hand midair, coin glimmering like mercy on pause. Even the traffic lights seemed to hesitate, as if asking, “Did that really just happen?”
1. The Gospel According to the Beggar
Here was I — a black man, born from the soil the world once called dark, offering alms in the heart of the so-called lighted continent — and the recipient of my charity fled from me like I was the ghost of colonial reparation.
In that instant, I realized: Europe has progressed so far, even their beggars have self-esteem. They would rather starve in dignity than accept pity from history itself.
But perhaps it was not pride. Perhaps it was disbelief. Maybe he thought I was an undercover angel sent to test him — or worse, a scammer from paradise with a European license plate.
The scene replayed in my mind as philosophy: how can a continent so advanced produce a man so shocked by generosity? I laughed — not because it was funny, but because it was humanly absurd.
Development, it seems, does not eliminate hunger; it only gentrifies it. Even poverty in Europe is polished — it wears coats, speaks German, and refuses money politely.
Meanwhile, in Africa, our beggars are theologians. They quote scripture, bless your family, and remind you that “God will double your seed.” They take your coin with gratitude and evangelism. In Europe, they take offence.
That moment — one tiny act of rejected kindness — became the preface to my meditation on Western genius.
For if they have truly borrowed the hands of angels, then surely some angels are now unemployed, standing by traffic lights, refusing mercy from mortals.
I laughed again, the way only an African philosopher can — with both amusement and pain. For perhaps the beggar was not running from me.
Perhaps he was running from the irony that the giver had once been the colonized, and the receiver, the descendant of conquerors.
Civilization, after all, is a circle — and I had just met its punchline on a German street.
2. The Hands of Angels or the Shadows of the Fallen
There are moments when one gazes upon the cathedrals of Europe, the cold precision of their technology, the orchestral coordination of their systems — and wonders whether man alone could have conceived such symmetry. The question ceases to be merely historical; it becomes theological. Did Europe borrow the hands of angels, or are we living amidst the monuments of fallen ones?
2.1 The Genius Beyond Flesh
The white man’s civilization is not merely mechanical — it is metaphysical. To build machines that mimic thought, to split the atom and rearrange creation’s code, to navigate the very mathematics of the stars — such feats border on divinity. This is not the work of a mere species struggling for survival. It is the expression of a mind that has dared to look God in the eye and replicate His architecture in circuits, steel, and software.
What Africa prays for, Europe manufactures. What Asia meditates upon, the West commercializes. And yet, in that brilliance lies a haunting silence — the silence of something traded, something lost.
2.2 The Covenant of Fire
Prometheus in Greek mythology stole fire from the gods and gave it to men. Europe, it seems, perfected the theft. Every discovery, from electricity to nuclear power, bears the moral weight of that ancient defiance. Science, stripped of conscience, became not enlightenment but necromancy — communing not with heaven but with the unseen forces beneath it.
Industrial revolutions rose not from prayer but from the alchemy of dominance. The soil was bled, the oceans drained, the skies violated. The more they built, the more man’s soul receded behind machinery. They mastered the physical, but at the cost of metaphysical innocence.
2.3 The Spiritual Cost of Intelligence
There is a genius that builds nations, and there is a genius that destroys them. Europe’s intellect often walks the knife’s edge between both.
How else does one explain a civilization that can design the Sistine Chapel and Auschwitz under the same cultural sky? The same intellect that decoded DNA also manufactured chemical weapons. It is the paradox of light that casts its own darkness. The white man’s mind, for all its brilliance, may not be purely human — it may be a mind possessed by its own enlightenment.
2.4 Borrowed Hands, Broken Souls
If angels guided their hands, then the angels have long wept at what those hands have done. If they are fallen angels themselves, then we understand why progress has so often come dressed in violence. The cross and the sword travelled together; the Bible and the gun shared the same suitcase. Colonization was not an accident — it was a theology of superiority masquerading as salvation.
Africa became the testing ground for their “divine intelligence.” Our minerals became their miracles. Our blood became their ink of progress.
2.5 The Reckoning
Today, artificial intelligence threatens to replace the very concept of creation. The same spirit that once built cathedrals now builds algorithms that mimic God’s breath. But there is a spiritual law the universe never forgets: everything borrowed from heaven must be repaid, and everything stolen from hell must be returned with interest.
Europe’s brilliance is awe-inspiring. But one must ask: brilliance at what cost?
Perhaps they are not fallen angels. Perhaps they are men who learned the ways of the fallen and called it progress.
Final Reflection
There is no question that the West’s development is beyond ordinary human scope. The unsettling truth is this: every civilization that touches the fire of heaven must choose whether to illuminate or to burn.
The angels taught them how to build.
The fallen taught them how to rule.
And the rest of the world — Africa especially — must now decide whether to imitate their hands or redeem their souls.
